Quotes about Human nature

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

God who created us has granted us the faculty of speech that we might disclose the counsels of our hearts to one another and that, since we possess our human nature in common, each of us might share his thoughts with his neighbor, bringing them forth from the secret recesses of the heart as from a treasury.

Human beings are by their nature social and political, living in community even more than every other animal.

We should meet abuse by forbearance. Human nature is so constituted that if we take absolutely no notice of anger or abuse, the person indulging in it will soon weary of it and stop.

People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.

When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.

The Reformed Church in adhering to the doctrine as it had been settled in the Council of Chalcedon, maintained that there is such an essential difference between the divine and human natures that the one could not become the other, and that the one was not capable of receiving the attributes of the other. If God became the subject of the limitations of humanity He would cease to be God; and if man received the attributes of God he would cease to be man.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be. WILLIAM HAZLITT

know so well that human nature is human nature everywhere, whether under tile or thatch, and that in every specimen of human nature that breathes, vice and virtue are ever found blended, in smaller or greater proportions, and that the proportion is not determined by station. I have seen villains who were rich, and I have seen villains who were poor, and I have seen villains who were neither rich nor poor

Thus mankind cannot approach the waters of salvation but can only be prepared for them. For Prov. 16:1 says: "It is the part of man to prepare the soul." But human nature was prepared in this way by the law of Moses, because the Law prepared but did not give, just as a boy is prepared by the tutor to be fit for his inheritance, but it is the father who gives it. Therefore Christ or the faithful people in the Law already seeks to enter into grace and the church of Christ.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

The line between good and evil runs, not between 'us' and 'them', but down the middle of each of us.